Vivek Chibber How The Left Got Lost Doomscroll

TITLE: Vivek Chibber: How the Left Got Lost | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2025-04-16 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Well, this means if you want to get a job in cultural studies and gender studies and race studies, you’re going to have to talk that oppression talk. People get incredibly upset when you say that. You couldn’t dream of a better lift for the capitalist class than this. So, this was in one way you could say an abandonment of radical scholarship. If by radical we mean what it’s always meant, which is you go to the root of things. And the root of modern society is capitalism. That generation of the left had itself degenerated morally and intellectually to essentially now shifting towards various forms of identity politics, academia and NGOs. These are the two sectors that control the left now. It’s a dead left. We are I really do believe we’re starting over. I don’t think the intellectual resources of the left have been weaker at any point in its history than they are today. Welcome to Doom Scroll. I’m your host, Joshua Citarella. My guest is Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Confronting Capitalism, published by Verso in 2022. The Class Matrix, Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, published by Harvard University Press in 2022. And Postcolonial Theory and The Specter of Capital from Verso Books in 2013. Vivek Chibber is the editor of Catalyst Journal, founded in 2017 and published by Jacobin Magazine. He is the host of the Confronting Capitalism podcast. Is critical race theory a Marxist plot? Uh No, it has nothing to do with Marx. Trump told me it was. I know. Well, there’s a deeper point here, which is this, that the great con job that the current woke left has done is that it’s branded all of this um the this culture of [ __ ] as a lineal descendant of Marxism. Right. And what’s dangerous now it’s important for them themselves because they want to present themselves not as the voices of reaction, which is what they are, but as people who took everything that was absorbable from Marxism, but now adorned it with the most recent theoretical advances, so it’s actually now more powerful than it used to be. Because a lot of the population on the right sees it for the [ __ ] that it is, it’s now able to say that the Marxists have taken over the university. Christopher Rufo’s book is a book that says that our universities are run by Marxists. And the result of that is that any legitimate left that’s going to be coming up now is associated with this illegitimate woke left. And the because the public hates the woke left, despises them, it puts socialists on a very difficult footing because they’re branded, they’re painted with the same brush as critical race theory, as post-structuralism, as postcolonial theory, decoloniality, and all this kind of stuff. One of the main responsibilities of socialists now is to openly and vocally criticize the woke left. They’re hesitant to do so, and I think the reason they’re hesitant is a lot of them have a lot of the socialists left exist on social media, magazines, podcasts, and a lot of their viewers are these people, and they’re afraid of alienating them. They’re afraid of cuz a lot of the viewer consumers of left media are identitarians. And your people are afraid of alienating them, but unless you start criticizing this stuff, you’re going to go down with the ship. Rufo’s going to win. Trump’s going to win. The battle against the university left, they’re going to win it. The battle against woke media, they’re going to win it. And unless we’re able to say that yeah, we think this stuff is [ __ ] we’re going to be left holding bag b- because we’re a lot weaker than either of these two factions. Because the current left is in organizations that whose culture doesn’t come out of class building, of confronting capital, but whose culture comes out of moonlighting and uh do-goody kind of stuff um that left is one that’s not constantly disciplined by the hard facts of building something. It’s not disciplined by the hard facts of bringing ordinary people in. You go to the meetings just to feel better about yourself. Mostly, right? Mostly. Okay. Now a layer on top of that this ideology that says most of the people are idiots. Most workers are white racists or misogynists or transphobes. I’m going to go in there to teach them. If I come across a worker, I’m going to teach them the evils of racism, the evils of misogyny, right? But I don’t know if I can. There’s a 300-year history in the United States, and I’m just one person. Um So, you do it, and when you lose, you see it as a vindication of your skepticism about the class Hm. rather than a failure on your part of winning the class to your program. In fact, the losing is a signal that you’re so far ahead of the masses that they still have to catch up with you, right? Losing means you’re right. Absolutely. I’ll I’ll give you an example of this. I’ve given this before. I It really struck me. With the current left, as you said in an earlier question, you said when voting people working people vote for Trump, they say they’re voting against their interests. Worse yet, they say this is what racism gets you. This is the misogyny. They’re voting for them because voting for Trump because they’re xenophobes and racists and misogynists, etc., etc. And you saw after Trump won all this stuff on social media where they were saying, I told you. I told you this is who they are. Don’t come to me. Don’t come to me when they’re knocking at your door and they take your rights away. I tried to warn you. You brought this on yourselves, right? You brought this on yourselves. I was reading um some lectures that Togliatti gave, who was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in the ’30s in the Soviet Union. He had fled to the Soviet Union from Mussolini. He gave these American these American lectures on the rise of fascism in Italy. And he started the lectures by saying, our biggest task right now is to figure out what we did wrong. Why did Italian workers veer towards Mussolini instead of coming to us? That left took the rise of fascism as a failure on its part. This left takes the rise of Trump as a failure on the workers’ part. That’s the difference between the classical left and this one. This one, it’s instinct is to blame the masses and trumpet its own virtuousness. That left saw it as a failure of its part to bring the masses to its program. This the current left will go no it has no absolutely no possibility of succeeding as long as it has this attitude. And most of it, I would say the overwhelming majority, has no interest in no inclination to change that attitude cuz they’re not in the game to win, they’re in the game to feel better about themselves. It there’s a moral collapse in academia. It’s connected to two things. One is that they don’t attract the kind of people they used to 30 years ago. Hm. 30 years ago like sociology would attract social worky do-goody kind of people. Decent people. Not especially ambitious intellectually, but they wanted to do a decent job. Progressive liberals, that kind of thing. But open to left-wing ideas. That’s no longer true. Uh what sociology especially, but I’ve seen it in the other disciplines, now what do you attract is people who just want to get out of the job market, the private sector job market. Huh. There’s a few academically oriented ones, but mostly you get amoral very professionalizing hyper-careerist people who just want to be told what to do. I almost no intellectual interest whatsoever. They want to be bureaucrats? So, they want to work at NGOs? Or what’s their No, they want to be academics who just publish in three or four key journals, which are the top journals. So, they hone their entire academic program to having the skills and the world view that the outlook that those journals will accept. Right. And layered on top of that is this faux radicalism, that the victim oppression hierarchy kind of stuff because um this is the weird part. They They just want to be car salesmen. Their mentality is of car salesmen, but they want to their self-image is of justice warriors. That’s it’s got to be a an image of social justice that has radical hype, but doesn’t challenge the status quo even a little because then they won’t get into the journals, and they won’t get the top jobs cuz they’ll have pissed off the wrong people. And that’s the moral collapse of radicalism because all of these people speak and write in a radical language, but it’s with the all the hatred of working people, all the contempt towards the poor, all of the valorization and valorization of the mandarin class that come that’s always been there in elite ideology from the 19th century birth of liberalism. That wasn’t there 30 years ago. So, now you get all these hyper-radical sounding people whose who don’t want to even want to hear about what the traditional radical left talked about capitalism, class, poverty. Right. Uh that’s been the I would I would call that the dysfunction of academia. Not the the other stuff cuz the other stuff is just it’s just professional competitiveness, you know? Right. Not enough jobs. And that is connected to the collapse, the downward mobility of the professional class cuz the people we’re getting now are who should have gone into the private sector as salaried people but either failed or find it too difficult or too alienating and they bring all that all that ideology of the upwardly mobile, the frustrated upwardly mobile professional into academia. And the moral the moral bankruptcy bankruptcy of those people as well. In the last few years a lot of my colleagues started to adopt language like abolish the family, abolish the police thing this kind of maximalist rhetoric and we’re used to institutions, universities, these kind of professional settings dialing down the radicalism of people’s political positions but now it seems to be amplifying it which is a very unique unusual thing. I was wondering if you have thoughts about that shift and what seems to be happening in universities now. Something shifted in universities around the 1990s I would say. In race and ethnic studies Bear Rustin predicted this. You got radicals from the 60s coming into the universities and changing university culture initially in very positive ways because you could actually now talk about aspects of social domination and facts about oppression and exploitation that earlier you could only speak about in a coded language and by earlier I mean 50s, 60s, 70s. If you look at the top journals coming out of all the disciplines they did address major issues of the day but they they didn’t they couldn’t conceptualize it in a crystal clear way because you’re still in the Cold War and you couldn’t do that. 70s is when that starts to change and by the late 80s to 90s but when I entered grad school in 90s you you were expected to be kind of progressive in certain disciplines and history, sociology, anthropology and English you were expected to be on the left. Whatever that means on the left, right? Yeah, yeah. I would say for about 15 or maybe even 20 years that was a very positive thing in academia. You had an enormous efflorescence of radical scholarship. Enormous. Since the birth of Marxism we’ve been seeing nothing like what you saw from say 1965 to 1990. It was a whole generation long expanse where they changed all of academic scholarship across the disciplines and it was all very sound work very serious. There is this a key non-Marxist sociologist named Michael Mann who taught at UCLA for a long time. He just retired. I was there giving a talk once and he said to me he’s um fairly advanced by that time. This is the early 2000s. He said, “You know, when I was an academic in England in the 1970s and 80s whenever a Marxist came to give a talk everyone would go because whatever else you knew they were very serious and they’d give a serious talk.” And he said, “Yeah, that’s no longer true on the left.” So it was an an amazing time. What happened was two things changed I think by the early 2000s. One was clearly that generation of the left had itself degenerated morally and intellectually abandoning their initial interest in broad systemic questions and commitments to working people and and their lives to essentially now shifting towards various forms of identity politics. So this was in one way you could say an abandonment of radical scholarship. If by radical we mean what it’s always meant which is you go to the root of things and the root of modern society is capitalism. But they wanted to call themselves their self-image was still radical. Now these are all people who want to be professionals, they want advancement, they want career success. They have no connection to movements anymore, none. So they want a radicalism that’s consistent with their professional ambitions. And they want a radicalism that’s consistent with their worldview. These are the two things you have to match. Their worldview by now is one that’s out of an upwardly mobile professional and their ambitions is to go to the top universities which are entirely controlled by people who are wedded to the status quo. So radicalism changes. Radicalism now becomes a radicalism that uses the language of oppression, domination, justice and all that but ceases to link it to broad systemic issues and refashions the liberation the goals of liberation to the impediments the blocks to upward mobility of people who are in the professions but not getting everything that white men are getting. So now radicalism becomes removing barriers to mobility. The key of which is discrimination bias, things like that. Working people don’t say I suffer discrimination, they suffer exploitation but upwardly mobile professionals if they in fact suffer discrimination if they’re women, they in fact suffer it if they’re black, they in fact suffer it if their sexual their their gender identity doesn’t fit with the the dominant one. What happens therefore is radicalism becomes mainstream. Because these are the people who control the syllabi in Yale, Harvard, Princeton Yeah. Columbia, right? Mhm. So now first the so the first thing that happened was radicalism changed from a confrontation with capitalism and desire to study the history of capitalism to a confrontation with discrimination marginalization frustrated ambitions, things like that, right? So that’s the first thing. So now the second thing that happens is the universities make it part of their brand, the top universities. These universities now attract try to attract students from wealthy families by saying not only will we give your kids an education but we’re going to teach them to be better human beings and the the way they’ll be better human beings is by understanding oppression. By we have courses on activism, etc. etc., right? So you get not only a shift biographically and institutionally in the intellectual orientation of radicals, it’s given a stamp of approval by institutions, powerful institutions. Well, this means if you want to get a job in cultural studies and gender studies and race studies you’re going to have to talk that oppression talk. But the content is going to have to be one that’s acceptable. We’re talking about from the 90s onward. Yeah, mid-90s onward. And you mentioned before that the intellectuals that were formed in the era of the 60s by that point had moved into the institutions. I wanted to spend a moment on the phenomenon of the new left in the 1960s. I wonder if you could talk about the context and the ideas that were flowing around that time that transformed the left at this point of inflection. It is undoubtedly true that working people cease to be the focus. I think what you had was not so much a shift to students per se as the key historical agents but a slide into a miasma where everybody’s an agent. So that’s what intersectionality is. Mhm. Women suffer their oppression. Gays and lesbians suffer their oppression. Racial ethnic minorities suffer theirs and um there’s no particular fight that’s more important than any other fight and so you fight all of these things everywhere and the key thing is that domination that oppression is everywhere. And this is an important thing if you want to refashion radicalism around your own class interest if you’re a professional. You’ve got to say you cannot say that the real action is in workplaces, in neighborhoods of poor people or on the streets. You’ve got to because that means you’ve got to go after them. Who wants to do that? What you’ve got to say is that oppression is everywhere which means if I walk into the faculty lounge and I don’t get my cappuccino exa- exactly when I want it, that’s a fight I’m going to take up. Yeah, yeah. If I don’t if I get a salary that’s 10% less than the other guy’s salary and and I happen to be a woman or a person of color, that’s oppression and I’m not exaggerating. There’s dozens of books on this that have come out in the last 10, 15 years of what it feels like to be a minority in an in literally in an elite department or a woman in an elite department because you’re not getting what the other people are getting. Right. That’s a fight that’s no less important now to these folks than the fight in workplaces. Why? Because power is power and that power is everywhere. And this happens to be there’s this thing now wherever you are fight there. It sounds great. But the fact is the places you inhabit may not be at all important in the reproduction of the key forms of domination in society. But it’s a great way for faculty and NGOs to say we’re never going to actually try to organize working people because I happen to be in this site and that’s the site I’m going to politicize. I think that’s called hyperpolitics now. Yeah, yeah. Politicize every [ __ ] thing. Why? Where you are is a site of complete irrelevance to capitalism, right? But that’s what you’re going to politicize. That I think is the key thing here, not the shift to students but the dissolution of the very ambition of figuring out what are the central nodes of power where’s the leverage in society and that’s where we have to organize. Everything the radical the current radical ideology is an ideology all of it that has been changed to suit the needs of two key sectors. Academia and NGOs. These are the two sectors that control the left now. Right. The left not society is controlled by by capital. Yeah, what’s called the left. Society is of course controlled by capital but this is a left you couldn’t have dreamt of a better if you were the American corporate community and somebody said to you, “Look, there’s always going to be a left. What kind of left would you like for yourself?” Great opponent to have, yeah. When something goes wrong when when work poor people, working people, out of desperation start moving to the right, this is a left that says, “They failed us. The poor no longer deserve our support. Right. They’re no longer worthy of us. You couldn’t dream of a better left for the capitalist class than this.” I’ve heard you talk before about the cultural turn, particularly on the left. What is the cultural turn and when did that start? The cultural turn essentially is simply a turn away from taking political economy and facts about the economic structure of society as the pillars, the foundations of modern society. A turn away from that and looking to people’s ideology, their culture, their consciousness as being the key to it understanding anything. So, essentially it’s the turn to culture as the in a very broad way, the turn to culture as the key to society rather than economics as the key to society. I I I see the turn to culture as two phases. One that was quite positive, did a lot of good, and one that was entirely destructive. The two the and those two phases correspond to two different moments in history. The The positive one starts really in I would say the late ’50s, early ’60s in any meaningful way. At the heart of it really is these German philosophers called the Frankfurt School. And then in England, it’s people around the Communist Party who are now disillusioned with the Communist Party. So, we’re talking about E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall. In the United States, um Fredric Jameson, people like that. You You’ll have heard of some of these people in your own work. Uh Laclau and Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and then later on you get a whole bunch of them. The key turning point really is the early ’80s for for the And this one was entirely destructive. The earlier phase takes understanding culture as important because it says, correctly, people may be located in economic conditions, but they perceive the world through cultural prisms. So, we need to understand how that culture works to understand how people in their engagement with the world are affected by their socialization, are affected by their I the media and things like that. That’s And then that’s entirely correct. That did not question the overwhelming pressures that material circumstances place on people. It just said, “Look, they When they feel those When they confront those circumstances, they draw on ideological resources.” That’s true. So, let’s understand those resources. What the later cultural turn does is it diminishes and even then denies the importance of the material circumstances and essentially says it’s people’s No, don’t People don’t simply perceive the world through culture. Culture makes their world. So, now things like class, economic structures, profit maximization, those are not demands that are imposed on people through their hard circumstances. They’re simply cultural artifacts and you can change the world by changing people’s perceptions. You can change the world by changing the way the media works or their socialization works. And How’s that working out? Well, it’s given you the world we have. Uh it’s given you know, the question is did that destroy the left? No, it was a symptom of the destruction of the left. Nobody who actually goes out, organizes people, sees the lives that they lead, faces employers, sees the consistency with which employers confront unions, whether they’re Hindu employers or Christian employ- Nobody in their right minds will say it’s cultural driving this stuff. They see that it’s the bottom line. With workers, they see it’s the struggle to put food on the table. When you remove intellectuals from that setting and you put them in these universities and you say, “Theorize the world and but please do it in a way that doesn’t harm your career.” You get this. So, it’s a it’s a symptom of the left’s destruction. It’s not the cause, but it is an enormous obstacle now in revitalizing the left. Right. Because what’s called left discourse mainly exists in professional spaces. The media, journalism, academia, places like that. And those places are entirely hegemonized by this garbage. So, to get to cultivate a intelligentsia and organizers who try who want to understand the world as it is does require engaging the stuff, which is why you know, like I do what I do and you’re doing what you’re doing is that it is important to try to resuscitate that culture of intellectual inquiry and engagement that was committed to actually understanding the world and not just propagating [ __ ] This contemporary iteration of the left, what do they expect the leverage the political leverage to be? Why would they think that anyone should meet their demands? What I have encountered in this left is a reluctance and indeed a indifference to that question itself. A reluctance to answer it they because this left was profoundly shaped by the Foucauldian turn. Yes. And by the American version of a which is called multiple oppressions theory that came out of the contemporary what’s called intersectional theory, intersectionality, is really just multiple oppressions theory uh with a bunch of fancy verbiage layered on top of it. In both of these schools, two things are important, intersectionality and the Foucauldianism. One is that the very idea of centers of power is a hangover from 19th century philosophy and if you’re really cool and with the times, um you you need to study theory that is no older than 30 years and uh Foucault says that it’s the interstices that matter, not central nodes of power. The keyword was the interstices, which is power’s everywhere in the folds and the wrinkles of society. And so, you liberation comes from fighting everywhere all the time. So, first of all, there is a rational core to that view, which is that this may be you may be living in a moment where union movement’s dead on its track. We’ll take the fight somewhere else. That’s fine. But you don’t delude yourself into thinking that fights inside student halls or faculty lounges are going to substitute for fights inside workplaces. Yeah. That’s what’s lost. So, that you take the rational core, but you then remove the distinction, right? About where the leverage is. Current left doesn’t ask that Cuz the moment you ask the question, you look like an idiot. The moment you ask, “Well, is there a leverage over here?” You’re probably like, “Well, what?” No, obviously not. So, we got to roll up our sleeves and join the other fight. So, my own view is what is called left discourse today, coming out of the academies, has found an incredibly powerful institutional anchor for itself. The institutional anchor is this. Universities like it because it make it gives these top universities a kind of patina of being socially engaged and giving back to the community because they’re cultivating activism, they’re cultivating uh awareness of justice, an awareness of of rights. They’re not just a diploma mill sending people out into the corporate world. So, they like it for that reason. That’s an institutional anchor. Secondly, as long as you’re you take radicalism to be the fight against disparities, you’re golden because disparities will never end in the professional class. Right. Even in socialism, you’re going to have bias. Even in socialism, you’re going to have some degree of prejudice. And so, there will be people who when they you study are Is every ethnicity every gender identity get it getting what the top men are getting? The answer is probably going to be no for the foreseeable future. Which means for the professional classes, this is golden as a form of radicalism because radicalism means fights within the top 2% of the population over who gets what while burning down the other 98% of the population. This has an institutional anchor now because universities reward you if you do this scholarship. And biographically, it means that whereas 60 years ago, if someone like you you guys came to the left, people say to you, “Okay, the left means fighting for socialism, fighting for the lives of working people.” Now, you’re told, “Left is this. Why don’t you have what that guy has over there?” Hm. So, being a socialist early on meant some degree of sacrifice, some at least some. Even for a professor, it meant putting up with which is what socialists still do, the few of us that are there. You You put up with um some degree of discrimination against you. You’re not rewarded the way others are. People who are functionally illiterate treat you like you’re the simple-minded person. So, you get the opprobrium, the condescension of idiots. That’s no longer true because now you’re told, “You only have a job at NYU? You should be at Harvard. Fight that fight, brother. Hm. Until you get to Harvard, you’re oppressed.” So, professional frustration can now be expressed in the language of radicalism. This is an incredibly powerful institutional anchor. So, in my mind, within the professional classes, within acade- academics, for the foreseeable future, this is the radicalism you’re going to find. I don’t think it’s going away because it is so closely now aligned to the material interests of academics, especially if you’re not a white male heterosexual white male. Therefore, in my opinion, if radical scholarship, anti-capitalist scholarship, and intellectual engagement is going to come back again. And it’s not going to be in the academy. The academy’s dead. Mhm. Academics will be involved. Individuals who are professors will be involved. But they’re going to have to go to the the these new venues that are coming up. Social media is going to be a part of it. Serious intellectual debate and discussion is not going to happen in the academy for the foreseeable future. It’s going to happen in places like Jacobin, podcasts like or YouTube uh channels like this one elsewhere cuz um there is no reason for academics ever to come back to not just socialism, but even old-style liberalism. Right. There’s just no reason for it. Yeah, the values of liberalism are actually in crisis here. They’re in their death throes. Or the way I would put it is I think liberalism is going back to its roots of the mid-19th century. If you look at mid-19th 19th century liberalism, it was a lot like what we have today without all the race and gender talk. It was essentially uh professionals and small property people demanding better access to to rights and to uh material goods for themselves. Greater access that’s controlled by the ruling classes while all the time pissing on working people. And that’s where we are now. That was That’s the tradition That’s the instinctive ideology of of the professional classes. I’m glad the DSA is around and like you, I I’m very open to seeing where it goes because of the the peculiarity of this this moment. We’ve never had a moment like this in the history of capitalism like we are now. There’s never been a moment where you there was the absence of a trade union movement and the absence of a socialist intelligentsia. We we don’t have either of those things today. I mean, there are a few socialists here and there, but nothing that you would call a socialist intelligentsia. And the kind of capitalism we’re facing is also very different from when the left was born. It’s no longer a capitalism that is based in the advanced world except for a few except a few couple of countries. It’s no longer a capitalism with the manufacturing industries. It’s a service-based and a much more of a financial capitalism. Yes. We don’t know where we’re we’re going to go, so I’m open. But it’s a fact that to say that we’re open doesn’t mean that we’re we know nothing. Um the DSA, in my opinion, is it has been a very positive force, but it’s it’s limited in what it can do. And I I think it’s limited for two reasons. One has to do with the fact that it’s an organization for people who are doing political tourism. Essentially, in your off time, you come to a meeting and and this is not meant as a slight. It’s just a fact. You come to a meeting in your off time, you you take part, you you do door knocking, you do electoral work, then you go back to your home. So, it doesn’t people who are in DSA don’t have their material interests tied in with the success of the organization. Right. Right. That’s what tourism means. It’s a hobbyhorse. Mhm. And what that means is then you’re delinking the the way you intervene in debates from your an interest in seeing the debates resolved in a way that’s successful and that makes the party better. You can if the party burns down tomorrow, you’re okay. You still got your job, you still got your family. And what that does is it gives people license and autonomy to be incredibly destructive inside the organization. Now, why is that a worry? It’s for the second reason. The second reason that to worry, apart from the fact that it’s staffed with people who are political tourists, um is the class composition of those people. It’s still mainly a haven for frustrated professionals, right? A frustrated professional is a very dangerous human being because they’re frustrated not just in their economic advancements, but also in their social life. And for when I that in all the time I’ve been on the American left and I was in the in for lack of a better term, the organized left for about 15, 18 years. This was the ’90s and early 2000s. It was mostly all middle class people, but in particular, it was social misfits, people who were unhappy in their social lives or in their intellectual life and they were just unhappy people and they would bring that unhappiness into the organization and want the organization to be a balm for them, to be some kind of palliative, something that made them feel better. And uh they would pour out all of their unhappiness onto everyone else, right? Like group therapy in the meeting? Group therapy was the positive, the better part of it. It was mostly just bitching sessions and accusations. You’re such and such, you’re so and so, you’re a misogynist, you’re a say you you know, this kind of stuff. Had a lot of Zoom calls like that. Stacking, you know, that kind of thing. Of course. Progressive stack. Yep. Um horrible, just destructive ways of conducting yourself. Now, if if your well-being and your livelihood is connected to the organization. Now, suppose you’re in a union and the union is what keeps your wages alive and you you rely on those wages, you’re going to curb yourself in how you conduct yourself inside the organization because if you if the organization is destroyed because of your psychosis, uh you also will suffer. But when you’re just moonlighting and you have your livelihood, you have your job and you go there because you want to feel like you’re a social justice warrior or you have grouses you want to take out of the world and all that, you can burn it down and walk away and it won’t affect you. That has an impact. Now, I don’t I’m not in DSA, but I I know a lot of people who are and they they have to deal with this. They have to deal with really unhappy or misguided people who just plant their flag and will not budge even if it means that branch becomes dysfunctional. Why? Because if it becomes dysfunctional, it doesn’t matter to you, right? Right. two things are very important. The fact that it’s the the DSA is still staffed with professionals and the fact that they’re moonlighting. Um that means that it’s it’s ability to turn itself into what traditionally socialist parties have been is limited. What have they been? They’ve been fighting organizations that are the members of whom come from the class that you’re supposedly representing and fighting for. And I hate to say it, but it’s a life of sacrifice and struggle. Mhm. And you know, it’s I know the reaction’s going to be “Well, you’re a professor. What right do you have to say this?” Fine. I I don’t have any right. But I can tell you what what it’s been in the past. These guys they go into their organizations these days. They become staffers in a union. They become staffers in DSA. The first thing they do is they form a union against the union. They unionize themselves in the union. So, unions now have unionized staff. And those unionized staff now take up union campaigns against their unions or against the NGOs that they’re working in. They only want to work 30, 40-hour weeks. They want weekends off. They want vacation time. They want And fine. I mean, every professional should have that, but if you take that into your socialist organizations, you want overtime and paid vacations while you’re fighting capital? Right. It’s just not It’s not going to happen. So, I It’s not just a DSA. I think the current crop of what’s called the it’s activist culture. It’s It’s what really what it is is students from colleges going into the left cuz they don’t like the private sector, but in the left, they want to have the life of a professional, comfortable life of a professional while doing social justice stuff and I don’t begrudge that motivation, but don’t don’t take it into the left because the left is a place where you’re mostly going to lose. You’re going to take on the most powerful forces in the world. They Right now, you’re not suffering because you’re so weak, capital doesn’t care about you, but sooner or later, if you grow to the point where it cares, it’s going to come down on you very hard and it might be at at a time when you’re vacationing or when it’s when you’re at home and calling up and saying this is overtime. You’re just going to You’re going to destroy the organization. Is there Is there some aspect of this also where if your involvement with these organizations is to achieve some type of moral fulfillment rather than just your material interest, let’s say, um it is quite convenient to lose in some cases. You still maintain the moral high ground. Uh not only is it convenient, I think they welcome it. And so, let me uh this is also a way in which the current left is different. First of all, let’s start by saying um for anyone anyone and everyone who’s in the socialist movement, including workers, there’s a deep moral component to your engagement. On very narrow economic grounds, if you’re a worker, you couldn’t vote fascist it because fascists have in fact given workers some material benefits. Right. Um a lot of workers when they vote for the left, do it not just on material grounds, but also on moral grounds. So, when they join a union, it’s also on moral grounds. And there’s never a time when pure economic calculation leads you to the left because pure economic calculation should always lead you to the right. Huh. The reason is the left always brings risks with it cuz you’re taking on power centers. No matter what their verbiage and their rhetoric, right-wing populists never actually confront power. Never. Because they’re right-wing, because they’re not anti-capitalist. They might be anti-business like this and that business. They might be anti-price gouging, but they’re never anti-capitalist. They will never face the same kind of reaction from capital that left-wing populists do. So, there’s always a risk that comes with being on the left, and so workers, if they’re rational, they’ll always go to the right. The reason they go to the left is the left also offers some material gains. Mhm. But, it’s also something that appeals to the moral sensibilities. Now, if you’re middle class, the way I am, you primarily go to the left for moral reason. You don’t go for material reasons. In fact, it’s makes no sense for a professor to be on the left. You You’d never win by being on the left, no matter what. Now, so there’s nothing wrong with moral fulfillment. What What distinguished the traditional left, though, was that your moral commitment was to the long-term project of of building a working-class movement, right? In which you saw your goal as one of kind of immersing yourself in the movement and prioritizing their interests over your professional interests, and their interests over your own personal feelings about yourself and your virtue signaling, that kind of thing. That’s where the current left is different. How do you think the left should consider its relationship to the Democratic Party? Well, right now, we’ve we’ve seen what happens when you go out when you reject the Democratic Party in toto. We’ve seen that was the ’90s, ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. You’re off in the wilderness. Where else you going to go? There are only two avenues right now for building a working-class movement. One is the unions, and the other is the party, Democratic Party. Unions, I don’t have to explain why. Democratic Party, why? Well, suppose you abandon you say it’s not the Democratic Party, we’re going to and it’s not the unions. The only other place left is churches and universities. There There were the only two spaces Every other space has been destroyed by neoliberalism. If you can go into the churches and use them to organize, great. I think that’s fabulous. God bless. Uh hasn’t happened yet. That leaves you with universities. And now, I think there’s no doubt. We have 30 years with universities. It’s where left socialists go to die. There’s a peculiarity of American culture heaped on top of this, which is that it’s a profoundly apolitical, depoliticized culture. It’s the first thing that strikes anybody, even Europeans, but especially people from the south who come to this country. It’s the only country where nobody talks about politics ever. And when they do it, they do it in a way that’s profoundly individualistic and personal and moralistic. It has nothing to do with political discourse. My father used to say, he came here for a short stint when he was alive, he said, the the typical street vendor in Delhi has a deeper appreciation of his country’s politics than college-educated people in the United States. Mhm. So, it’s an It’s a very apolitical culture. The only time people pay attention to politics is when there’s elections. So, elections becomes a time when you can use use that the campaigns as a springboard for your ideas and try to reach ordinary people bec- because in between the elections, since you don’t have unions, you don’t have the churches, you just talk amongst yourselves. The Democratic Party gives you a springboard. It It gives you a way of propagandizing. That’s what we saw with Sanders. In one campaign, he transformed American political culture, which 30 years of the new left couldn’t after the ’70s, right? Yeah. So, I think that you need to have some relationship with the Democratic Party. Now, obviously, if you fold yourself into it, you’re dead. So, this is what I said earlier, the left needs a party of its own because that party gives it an internal culture, a worldview, a cohesiveness, a forum for debating and discussing. But, that party is going to have to orient to the Democratic Party in some way or form. I leave that open right now. Some way or form. It cannot fold itself into the Democratic Party, in my opinion, because the forces of absorption are just too powerful. But, it cannot stay away from it because there’s a alphabet soup of socialist parties that came out of the new left that had nothing to do with the Democrats, and they went into the sectarian wilderness, and they were never heard from. They have some printing presses of their own right now. That’s the only signal that they exist. But, they did nothing. They achieved nothing. So, I I think that the the basic lesson for the left is your number one goal is stay as close to the mainstream of American culture as possible. Stay involved in everyday struggles and bring people into your organizations that don’t want to have endless debates on Rosa Luxemburg or on the Second International or on the class nature of the Soviet Union. Ordinary people who actually hate these debates. You’re going to get them through these more mainstream political activities. You won’t get them by putting up a poster saying, “Come to a meeting on socialism.” Uh cuz you’re going to get the same unhappy crowd on campuses that you got in the ’90s. I’ve heard you talk about the left in its relationship to liberalism, this kind of uh evolution of thinking, a kind of philosophical lineage. I wonder if you could frame that out for our audience of how these ideas evolve and the antagonisms, the conflict within liberalism that socialism may resolve. Liberalism has two components to it. One is its philosophical foundations, which I think are profoundly radical. And the other is its political history, which has largely been Radical within the framework of what came before. Profoundly radical as in it’s not consistent with the realities of capitalism. Mhm. I I think the philosophical foundations of liberalism lead to a opposition to capitalism. But, the political history of liberalism is is one that is um linked with the the property classes and linked with authority, and that makes it a contradictory phenomenon, right? Um the left’s relationship to it is this. The left socialism is a lineal descendant of philosophical liberalism, and I can explain why. So, it is a It is a growth of liberalism, a deepening of liberalism, not its abandonment. But, socialism has been always and everywhere opposed by the political liberalism, the liberalism of the parties. Uh and that makes for a fraught relationship. And it’s not hard, therefore, to understand why so many socialists have used the word liberal as a swear word, you know, as as something that’s negative. Because they’re always talking about political liberalism, the ones that are organized like the Democrats today. They call themselves liberals. But, when you think about what the vision of socialism is, what are the moral normative resources that it draws on, uh it’s it’s drawing on the foundations laid, in my opinion, not just by Marx, but Marx is drawing on Rousseau and Kant, some aspects of Locke, I think, and there’s no getting around that. So, Right. to my mind, it’s a deep affinity with philosophical liberalism, and a very embattled relationship with organized liberals, politically organized liberals. Speaking of this uh scaffolding of ideas and philosophies, building on what came before. A lot of people in elite universities make criticisms or condemnations of the Enlightenment. They say things like the Enlightenment was responsible for slavery, racism, colonialism, tragedies of the 20th century. How should the left understand its relationship to the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment gives you socialism. It did not give you slavery, that’s absolute nonsense. It’s simple reasoning here. Slavery’s been around, at least in the West, since uh the Greek city-states, and in Asia and Africa as long as we’ve What recorded history we have, slavery’s been around. As has slaughter, genocide, all that sort of stuff. Um you didn’t need the Enlightenment for that. On the other hand, you could not have not just socialism, but even liberalism without the Enlightenment. The This is not even This doesn’t even rise to the level of stupidity, this argument the Enlightenment caused these things. It’s true, of course, that Enlightenment ideas were used to rationalize slavery or uh social domination and even extermination. Any ideas Socialist ideas were used to rationalize Stalin’s gulag. That doesn’t mean Unless you want to believe that socialism leads to the gulag, fine. I don’t believe that. It’s the same reasoning that says the Enlightenment leads to these things. What is at the heart of the Enlightenment? Why do I I attach myself to the Enlightenment? And every Marxist until the until this that that decade of the ’80s when every bad idea today goes back to the that decade. Why did Marxists attach themselves to the Enlightenment? It’s because the Enlightenment gives rise to the idea of the sovereign individual. And the idea of liberty as connected to autonomy, individual autonomy. Marxists have always been worried about this idea of individual autonomy because they think it leads to individualism, which rightly they think is inimical to socialist ideas of cooperation and community and such thing. That’s true, individualism does. But, autonomy and individualism are related, but not the same thing. Autonomy is simply respecting the individuals’ rights against the community. It’s keeping the individual safe from being dissolved into the community. And that means not just people bossing you around or bullying you and your family or your religious community, it also means autonomy from oppression, autonomy from exploitation. That did not exist before the Enlightenment as an articulate idea. People fought against domination instinctively. But how did they express it? They expressed it in the a very imprecise communitarian language. What the Enlightenment gives you is the intellectual resources to theorize why oppression is bad, why exploitation is bad. The Enlightenment gives you on top of that the scientific mindset. And without that, how are you going to have socialist planning? How are you going to have social engine- How are you going to solve the climate crisis without science, which comes out of the Enlightenment? This whole anti-Enlightenment stick the Frankfurt School was on it early, and I think it’s a disaster. It is a colossal analytical error on their part, and that’s why I even I don’t think the good work they did outweighed all the damage that came out of the this anti-Enlightenment stuff. But it’s not just the Frankfurt School. This stuff really starts taking off when the New Left becomes disillusioned, unhappy, angry, and it starts looking for reasons why the 20th century turned out to be different from what they had anticipated at the time of the Russian Revolution. And instead of saying that look, man, we lost and now it’s time to pick ourselves up and start up again, instead they do what they’ve been doing ever since, which is blaming the world somehow. And blaming the Enlightenment is just one component of that. There’s just there’s no possibility of a theory of liberation and democracy without the foundations that the Enlightenment laid down. And like I said, it doesn’t even rise to the level of stupidity. I don’t usually go this deep into it on the podcast, but this is I think the underlying question of our our moment where people are literally using the word monarchy. Right? We’re talking about authoritarianism, theocracy, caste systems, and you have a contemporary left that refuses to acknowledge or believe in the Enlightenment, and many of the people theoretically dismiss it as being a bad thing, which just seems like a tremendous strategic error right now. If I recall correctly, you were a Maoist as a young man. Yeah, I was. I cuz I How old were you around then? I I thought of as of myself as a socialist or a Marxist for the first time I was 10 or 11. I was in India and I was raised there. Everybody around me was a Maoist. So, just like in the US if you came to socialism in the ’70s and ’80s, you probably gravitated towards Trotskyism. In India, it was Maoism. When I seriously started studying Marxism in as a undergrad for me, it was the Cultural Revolution and Third World was be called Third Worldism, the West Right grew rich by exploiting the global South. Um race politics, I I’m embarrassed to say, but I was, you know, I was deep into race politics and all that. Luckily, I was able to think my way through uh out of all these things uh at a certain point. Well, I’m curious about that political evolution. Previous to this podcast, I spent a lot of time interviewing young people. Um never 10 or 11. Some of them 16 recapping their political influences at age 13, so rather close. Uh but I’m curious about the influences, the experiences that allowed you to uh evolve, change in your thinking over time. The formative experience is really what brought me to Marxism. Mhm. And that was my my immediate family. Most of my parents were socialists. And members of our extended family were not just socialists, but very involved in organized politics, and I I had enormous admiration for all of them. And at a very young age, it was just clear It’s not It wasn’t just my family all of our social circle was very, very, very decent people, all of whom were in some way or form committed to socialism. And thank God I was in India, because these were normal people. These weren’t the emotional wrecks that came to the left in the ’80s in the United States. So, you see very humane, very decent, normal people who are in not alienated from their culture, part of their culture, feel at home in it circulate in it in the mainstream but are also socialist. As a young person, you see not that it’s a socialism is a train out of the mainstream into a wilderness, but it’s a it’s the most vibrant people that you see around you, the most dedicated, vibrant. And a lot of them were young. I was 10, 12, and I saw people in their 20s. Really hip, really deeply committed uh around us, and I thought, I mean, this is this is what it means to be fully alive. Uh and it was. It was It was an amazing moment in Indian history when I was growing up. It was the mid-’70s. Uh that was the formative thing. Now I when I was an undergrad at Northwestern, I I saw myself as a Maoist cuz all these people had been Maoists. But then as I started thinking really hard about the stuff, I I I was fortunate in that I had no one to talk to. I had no mentors, no professors, no political organization as an undergrad. So, the only way I could learn Marxism was by reading a lot. Mhm. And essentially what I did was for about 3 years, I I just locked myself in the library, and I There were three to four main Marxist journals in the world. Monthly Review, New Left Review, Science and Society, Socialist Register. I just read them all. From the first issue onwards, I just systematically read through everything. And all these debates around Maoism, Trotskyism, socialism, labor theory of value, history, all of them all these debates had occurred in the ’70s and ’80s. I read them all, and it was horrible, because every time I read something, it made perfect sense. Then I read the criticism, and that made perfect sense. It was just a very, very torturous experience. Then I would say in the ’90s, I did join a political organization called Solidarity, and they were tremendously gifted and very, I think uh dedicated thinkers in that. And that was another big experience, big formative experience for me that it solidified certain things I’d been thinking about. By that time, I was already out of Maoism. Um but it did give me a new tranche of intellectual resources that helped hone my to for lack of a better term, my abilities. Mhm. I would say though, Josh, my formative experience really was my my teen years. After that no one event or experience either brought me out of a certain way of thinking or immersed me in another. That was just engagement. Um I was One thing I had going for me is I I like to read a lot, so and I I like to read everything. So, I think what harms a lot of people is they only read the stuff they agree with, and they never come out of it. Right. Uh I I always read all the criticisms of everything I believed in, and then I saw, well what once you shake it, what’s left standing? Yeah. Yeah, how do you know what you believe in if it’s never been challenged? I really do believe we’re starting over. Uh this is something maybe you can talk about, but I don’t think the intellectual resources of the left have been weaker at any point in its history than they are today. Where we are today we are trying to go back and recapture and revitalize the spirit of the left when it actually accomplished something. Cuz the other thing that the thing about the post-‘68ers they achieved nothing. Right. Nothing. All these so-called new social movements, all the gains came out of the first wave of the new the new left, and it came out of the unions and labor struggles. So, my view has been, okay, if we want to revitalize the left, let’s go let’s look back to when it was most successful to see what it did. People get incredibly upset when you say that, that the New Left was not successful, because this is this is the canon that they were taught to revere. You know why? It took me a long time to figure this out. It’s because they wrote all the history books. So, the entire history of the New Left is by the New Left. Right. The entire history of the ’60s is by the people who got the jobs coming out of the ’60s and who wrote them. It’s a very self-congratulatory history. Yeah. But everything all the way up to the Civil Rights Movement it had nothing to do with the New Left. Mhm. The left wing of the Civil Rights Movement was very skeptical of the student movement. The left wing of that movement, Civil Rights Movement, was a labor-oriented movement. And it was really the New Left that took the credit for all the the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, but I don’t think they deserved them. So, when we try to revitalize today’s left, in my view, you have to go back to the ethos, the commitments, and the moral culture of that initial left. And that was a that wasn’t a left that wanted overtime, paid vacations and, you know, um summers in the Hamptons. They It was a left that was about struggle and sacrifice. And where the the middle-class elements that came to it took themselves to be they took their vocation to be one of of stepping out of their class environment and their class ambitions and disciplining themselves in the moral universe that came out of the Communist parties and the trade unions. That’s what has to be recovered. And took their intellectual activities as being deadly serious work, not the flippant garbage that you see coming out of the left today where you you spend the weekend on watching black and white documentaries coming out of Finland or something like that. We’re talking about necessary goods for survival, raising people’s living standards, things like this. There is this other political movement that is maybe not part of the left, so to speak, but is adjacent to it, the environmentalist movement. Uh some of their ideas I find a bit alarming. They talk about rationing resources, asking people to consume less. How should we understand the environmentalist movement from the perspective of a social democratic left? Well, there has to be a movement to reverse climate change and to preserve our environment. Right. So, any viable socialist movement has to also have a green component to it. Has Has to be dedicated has to prioritize reversing climate change. I I don’t think the current climate movement has that as its dominant concern. First of all, strategically, whatever your goals are for the environmental movement, it’s going to require taking on big sectors of the existing business community, obviously fossil fuels, but also others. Okay, to do that, you’re going to have to have some kind of leverage to bring them to heel. Who’s going to give you that? The historically, the only sector of society that’s had the power to bring business to heel has been labor. Okay, so you have to bring labor into as a key actor, I would say the actor for the environmental movement. Do they have any reason to do that? Nobody suffers more from climate change than working people. Nobody suffers more. They’re the ones who don’t have the means to get health care that comes from breathing toxic air, from the earthquakes, from the fires. Their Their homes get destroyed. They have no nowhere to go. Working people globally are living with open sewage in tenements, in slums. They’re the ones with the worst diseases, the worst health care outcomes because of climate change. Working people have a direct interest in fighting against climate change everywhere, in every country. The problem is this, you’re not going to bring them into your movement if you tell them you’re consuming too much. Because in fact, they’re consuming too little. Now, if the the you That may not be what you have in mind when you say you’re going to ration, that you’re going to consume less. Maybe in some of these models, and in some of them do, think that they’re going to take from the more wealthy sections and give to the poor. So, net consumption goes down, but consumption within working communities might go up. Okay, but if your slogan is degrowth, it’s the worst slogan in the history of the world. Because when an ordinary person sees that as your slogan, they’re going to say, “Oh, you mean joblessness?” Degrowth means joblessness. Degrowth means fewer things for me to give to my family. So, there’s a boiler plate version of degrowth, which doesn’t even say we’re going to increase the consumption of working people. It just says, “All of us have to share in the misery.” Well, they’ve been doing that for 30 years. It’s called austerity. Right. Austerity is degrowth. And you think this is going to work as a political slogan? But if you don’t mean that, and if you if you do in fact think I think there’s ways in which you can increase the welfare of working people. Even with slower growth rates, it’s possible. But you’d better have a different word for it than degrowth. Degrowth as a slogan simply again reflects the capturing of these movements by people who are just doing it for themselves, not for anyone else. Yeah. The second thing is I I do believe that if you want socialism to be sustainable, people’s standards of living can’t just be frozen, they have to increase, which means it has There has to be a growth model associated with it. So, I’m saying even if you were committed to some version, a progressive version of degrowth, it’s a stupid slogan. Um but I’m then I’m saying it shouldn’t have degrowth as your slogan. There are ways to have growth without destroying the environment. And until the Greens movement comes to this, they will never attract workers. And until they attract workers, they can never succeed. It’s just as simple as that. Yeah, I mean, the most uh radical elements of this faction will say things like humanity is the virus. The popular meme during the pandemic. don’t know how how popular these how influential these sectors are, you know, they they’re just they’re kind of warriors in their own mind. And it’s the second this comes out of the margins and the shadows and they say this stuff out in the open, they’re going to be completely isolated. I don’t worry about them. I worry more about the in the more mainstream green this degrowth stuff is taking off. And I just think it has zero chances of go going anywhere outside of the nonprofits. The nonprofits has been the hotbed for this stuff. And I don’t think it’s got It has zero chance of success. For viewers who are just encountering your work now, where do you suggest people start reading your work? What’s the best place to get introduced to what you do? Mo- Most of my work is pretty accessible, even my academic work. I try to write it in a way that uh anybody can understand it. The reason I do that is it’s for consumption, but it’s also for me. You can’t actually um figure out if you’ve understood something unless you say it clearly. Hm. So, most of it’s accessible. I would say the ABCs of capitalism are a good place to start. That’s been turned into a book called Confronting Capitalism. And that book is a It’s right there. Right. And that’s available. Uh and people can go there. The The thing about Confronting Capitalism is it’s it’s a book for organizers. The other books tend to be more taking on academic stuff, where I try to present academic scholarly arguments for against the cultural turn and and against other forms of radicalism. And I’ve done that because what happened with the the rise of this post-New Left crowd was that you can recognize them because they all write in sentences that don’t parse, that that have no meaning. And it’s created a culture on the left where either people say that you you’re criticizing me cuz you’re just not sophisticated enough to understand what I’ve said. Uh and so you have to show that in fact they’re the ones who don’t understand anything. Activists a lot of times will read a simple thing on capitalism and then they’ll go to a lecture or something and they’ll stand up and say something. And they’re always condescended to by intellectuals cuz they say, “Well, you know, obviously you you haven’t understood what I’m saying.” And so I wanted to take on the high-level academic stuff to show that it’s a house of cards. But also in it’s important for the left to recapture this culture where no matter what you’re writing on, no matter how abstruse, even if it’s quantum physics, write in a way that anybody can understand it. So, I try to embody that. Um the US has a long history of that. The Monthly Review, whatever you think of its politics, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff had this incredible commitment of taking the most complicated economic ideas and presenting them in this beautiful, lucid, simple language. That’s entirely dead now on the left because of the academization of the left and because of its flight into a [ __ ] a culture of [ __ ] So, I would like to see a left that not just for matters of consumption writes clearly, but understands that unless you write and think clearly, you won’t be able to engage the questions you’re trying to figure to to answer. And until we get back to that, we’ll never get anywhere. My favorite example of this is that when I first got serious about theory, coming from a background in the art world, I read tons and tons of Deleuze. And I was like, “What the [ __ ] is that Anti-Oedipus and a Body Without Organs and Desiring Machines?” I was like, “I can’t Is this poetry?” Sentences that go nowhere. I think it’s poetry. Yeah, I know. It’s it Well, I mean, they didn’t write poetry because as poetry, it’s really awful, right? It’s It’s terrible. Um no, I I remember I picked up um Lefebvre’s The Meaning of the It’s what’s called A Theory of Everyday Life. It’s three volumes. Hm. I started reading it and my pace just got faster and faster and faster because it was I I could go through every page and get nothing. Right. There was no content to anything. Hm. And um I got through two volumes in a single day and I I couldn’t tell you I don’t know what it said. I think that’s what turns off a lot of people what cuz they try to do a legitimate good faith engagement with the left and then they encounter this theory, which is just like fluff. It’s just like time-wasting homework. You don’t absorb anything from it. And if you can find someone who actually just makes [ __ ] sense, it’s so much easier, so much more compelling. Or Or worse, they don’t get turned off by they start mimicking it. Uh yeah, that’s worse. Yeah, and that’s what’s happened for 30 years now. When people write on the left, they write just gobbledygooky. I’ve had this experience with my books. People read it and they go, “This is simple-minded or simple.” And they confuse simplicity of expression with simplicity of thought. That That is the dead left. Yeah. The where you actually are now suspicious of clear writing. What are you going to do with that? It’s a complicated moment because my instinct is that when you’re watching young people become politicized online, they gravitate towards this right-wing critique of the identity politics. Yeah. And they’re correct about that. They’re actually The people on the right are saying something correct. And, you know, if the sky is blue and my enemy says the sky is blue, I’m not going to tell him it’s red to disagree with him. That’s just a true thing. And so that instinct, when you’re becoming politicized to lean a little bit towards, you know, in today’s construing right and left, lean that direction critiquing identity politics, is the correct instinct. And it then becomes the job of the left to take that critique, point them in the right direction, and build the working class movement. criticizing the illiberalism of the university, the illiberalism of the radical left, are the only people criticizing the way in which identity politics being played out today, the only people doing it is the right. You hand over all of these critiques to them, and people are going to go to the right. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re going to say, “If I I value free speech, therefore I’m a conservative.” We’re at the point where if you value free speech, you say you’re a you’re a conservative? Right. So, I years ago when um the war started in Ukraine, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I signed a letter saying the US should be part of an effort to negotiate for peace and much of the left was saying no, this is a war for Ukraine’s liberation and we should be funding them and fueling them and giving them all the arms possible. I saw right then that there’s no way Ukraine’s going to win. anti-free speech and pro-war. I don’t know how the [ __ ] this happened, but that’s yeah. And you got criticized I was criticized that how are you signing a letter with all these conservatives? And the argument the answer was exactly what Chomsky has said when he signed letters for the right of right-wingers to speech, which is if we don’t do it, it’s the right that is now standing up. If people don’t see that the left is supporting freedoms, then the right says we are the upholders of freedoms and that’s where we are right now. So we have to we absolutely have to distance ourselves from wokery because it is profoundly authoritarian and illiberal. It stands for institutional power, not liberation and it is the organic ideology of a particular section of the professional classes. It has nothing to do with progressivism. Vivek, thank you for joining us today. It was my pleasure. I’m just I’m an immense fan of your writing and your lectures. Your work is incredibly valuable. I’m grateful that you could join us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me and the the questions and the interview was great.